General Chittenden, our first authority on the history of the fur trade, says of the mountain men: "It was the roving trader and the solitary trapper who first sought out these inhospitable wilds, traced the streams to their sources, scaled the mountain passes, and explored a boundless expanse of territory where the foot of the white man had never trodden before. The Far West became a field of romantic adventure, and developed a class of men who loved the wandering career of the native inhabitant rather than the toilsome lot of the industrious colonist. The type of life thus developed, though essentially evanescent, and not representing any profound national movement, was a distinct and necessary phase in the growth of this new country. Abounding in incidents picturesque and heroic, its annals inspire an interest akin to that which belongs to the age of knight-errantry. For the free hunter of the Far West was, in his rough way, a good deal of a knight-errant. Caparisoned in the wild attire of the Indian, and armed _cap-a-pie_ for instant combat, he roamed far and wide over deserts and mountains, gathering the scattered wealth of those regions, slaying ferocious beasts and savage men, and leading a life in which every footstep was beset with enemies and every moment pregnant of peril. The great proportion of these intrepid spirits who laid down their lives in that far country is impressive proof of the jeopardy of their existence. All in all, the period of this adventurous business may justly be considered the romantic era of the history of the West.... "It was the trader and trapper who first explored and established the routes of travel which are now, and always will be, the avenues of commerce in that region. _They_ were the 'pathfinders' of the West, and not those later official explorers whom posterity so recognizes. No feature of western geography was ever _discovered_ by Government explorers after 1840. Everything was already known, and had been for fully a decade. It is true that many features, like the Yellowstone wonderland, with which these restless rovers were familiar, were afterward forgotten and were re-discovered in later years; but there has never been a time until very recently when the geography of the West was so thoroughly understood as it was by the trader and trapper from 1830 to 1840.